Porpoises on the Clyde

I read somewhere once that owning a RIB was basically the same as owning a large fibreglass hole in the ocean into which you throw money. I will add time to that as well, since our boat is pretty old and therefore in constant need of some sort of repair and because I know nothing about RIB maintenance that I haven't learned through tortuous trial-and-error. Some days, owning a RIB is an utter pain in the ass.

But then you get days like today and it all feels worthwhile.

Trail Island in the Clyde.

Today I took four experienced divers out onto the Clyde to explore around Trail Island by Little Cumbrae since it's not a site we've dived much before with the University club even though it's virtually on our doorstep. Unfortunately, issues with a dodgy neck kept me out of the water myself, but whatever - I still got to take my RIB out for a spin, so who cares!

I couldn't really ask for much more out of a Saturday afternoon! 

Anyway, I dropped the guys in for a thoroughly relaxed and uneventful dive along the cliff-face and then left them to it while I just enjoyed being back at sea (and doing a spot of high-speed driving practice because frankly if you've got a boat to yourself with a 90HP engine on the back it would be rude not to!). A short 45 minutes later, the divers came back happy but cold and with plenty of decent site information we can add to our list for the Uni club so we decided to call it a day and head back home for some lunch. And that's when it all got rather exciting.

Just as we were reached the channel between the two Cumbraes, I spotted a couple of porpoise near where we'd seen some earlier in the day and slowed down to approach them. Porpoise are usually shy and solitary creatures so I wasn't holding out much hope of getting very close, but I slowly trundled us towards the area they seemed to be congregating in anyway and stopped the boat.

Porpoise!

Within a couple of minutes it was obvious that we hadn't just found a couple of porpoise, and even more obvious that we must have stumbled into a feeding spot because we were suddenly surrounded by about 20 of them, all swimming actively and (strangely enough for porpoise) happily circling the boat! I've worked as a wildlife guide before in one of the UK's porpoise hotspots, but I've never seen as many as there were today and never so close! By the time I remembered I'd brought my camera, they'd been with us for a good 10-15 minutes and were showing no signs of being disturbed by our presence which was just awesome. Photography was virtually impossible because the glare on water meant you couldn't see them below the surface to track when they'd appear, but I did manage to get this one shot. It doesn't do the event any justice at all, but at least you can see how close they were to us!

I reckon if every Saturday could be like this, I'd would never have anything to complain about :)

Pilot Whales!

So yesterday was a pretty cool day! Sometime just after lunch we got a call from the bridge that there were pilot whales just beside the boat. As usual, there was a mad dash upstairs to try and see them before they disappeared off into the depths again, but it turns out we needn't have worried too much as the group stayed with us for the best part of an hour. 

Whale sightings tend to bring everyone out onto deck!

The species of pilot whale we get in temperate waters is the long-finned pilot whale, Globicephala melas which belongs to the group 'Odontoceti' or 'toothed whales'. Pilot whales are fairly common offshore, and I've seen them on most of the deep-water research cruises I've been on, but they don't tend to be a particularly active species, and they seem to spend a lot of time resting at the surface. It's always cool to see them, but you don't really get very exciting photographs when they're just relaxing! Yesterday we got lucky though and the group not only stayed with us for ages, but they were also actively diving and spy-hopping and also had a lot of very young calves with them. The calves were brilliant to watch as they were noticeably more exuberant and slightly more clumsy than their parents in the water, but also couldn't dive for nearly as long as the adults which helped us keep track of them as they moved around. Because the weather was a little rougher than normal yesterday too it meant that the animals were sticking their heads much further out the water than they usually do to breathe which meant we could get some really clear views of their faces. Anyway, without further ado, here's some of the best ones:

Pilot whale group. You can see from the fin sizes that there are a lot of  young animals present.

Popping up to breathe

All surfacing at once

And, my personal favourite (I am extremely chuffed with this photo, it took a lot of waiting to get it!):

Calf surfacing beside its mother.

The calf in that last photo was still young enough that you could see the foetal bands on its flanks, which are essentially caused by folds in the skin when the calf is still inside the mother's womb. They'll fade over time, but give an indication that this is still a very young animal, probably no more than a few weeks old.